


you i find like a ghost in my mind

by Anonymous



Category: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:36:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: In my sixth life, I met Vincent Rankis.





	you i find like a ghost in my mind

In my sixth life, I met Vincent Rankis.

He was an undergraduate, and I'd heard of him long before I put a face to him. What I'd heard of him was that he annoyed the porters and the other lecturers, sometimes by taking his studies far too seriously, and sometimes by being too unbearably brilliant and casual about it, as though anyone could come up with that proof while doodling monstrously fanged birds in the back of the lecture hall. And then one November night he barged into my rooms, as if resuming an argument about time and ethics I'd never started.

I took a step or two back, startled, but he drew me in. His complaints about current theories rang true with suppositions I'd been (informed by the future) advancing all along, things that made me seem like a fringe figure at the college but would prove right in the end. And if he agreed with me, he certainly had an exceptional mind. He might be one of those bright young things that changed the world, I thought, though I didn't recall ever hearing his name connected to great discoveries or theorems in any past life.

In a minor role, perhaps. Although, as he gesticulated, I wasn't sure he was suited for a minor role. He spoke with a bullish passion, and charged straight into everything, and I played the role of devil's advocate because, as a lecturer, I was committed to getting my students to think things through--though they rarely did--but I also didn't want to give him the satisfaction of winning so easily. I wanted to make him work for it, and work for it he did.

These encounters continued over the school year, and towards June he began to talk about the possibility of something, some perfect computer, some, as he termed it, "God machine."

"A god machine?" I repeated.

"Imagine," he said, "something that can harness the power of the atom to answer the most complicated questions. Who we are, what we are, our place in the universe."

"I thought we were discussing physics," I said, reaching for the claret, "not philosophy."

Vincent shrugged. "The two are closer than most realize: they are both the studies of how we live."

"The same could be said of any subject."

"Not math," said Vincent, "nor music."

I let him expound upon his reasoning. I enjoyed our discussions, but every so often he just wanted to talk an idea out, with my occasional input, and I just wanted to listen to his voice. I'd lived six lives, and yet loneliness was as painful in every one of them--sometimes, it seemed, more so as the years accumulated. And being a young lecturer was lonely, especially a young lecturer supporting theories that one's colleagues dismissed as nonsense, and one's students smirked at behind their hands--or worse, swallowed uncritically. I might have been content to keep to myself regardless, but Vincent was a welcome intrusion in my life.

"I think," he said, after he had shared his feelings on math with me, "that after I'm done, I might go into teaching."

"Oh?"

He smiled at me. "Impatience with the students is hardly a disqualification; just look at--" And he named a don who was notoriously short-tempered with everyone, and I snorted into my wine. "Besides, it's the most advantageous position for serious research; some of my ideas could not be expected to receive commercial funding."

I smiled wryly. The problem was not with his ideas but his presentation: he'd never bow and scrape, never feed the egos of those whose money he needed. Vincent could be passably polite, but there was an arrogance about his work that was blindingly obvious to all he discussed it with, and the grants would go to those who could more humbly beg for it.

Which was, I suppose, why he chose to stay with me. As predicted, I did not receive a professorship, but neither did he. We shifted universities a few times, first within Britain and then out to America. Sometimes we lodged next to each other; sometimes we lodged with one another.

I had been married in a previous life, and though it had ended in sorrow, I had loved Jenny, and missed her still. This was not quite a marriage, but it had many of the benefits, and, towards the end of our lives, Vincent and I were assumed to be a couple, which suited me just fine. I wouldn't have minded if we were. Our life-long companionship was pleasant, despite--or perhaps because--of Vincent's ability to be thoroughly irritating until he got what he wanted. Sharing a life with someone--someone who knew what you liked to read, to eat, to wear, even if they didn't know the greatest secret of you--was joyous, in a way that merely living with a person was not. As with Jenny, I also shared professional interests with Vincent: our lives intertwined to such a degree that by the seventies I could not imagine living without him, even though I knew that soon enough I would have to, in another life.

(I toyed with the idea of finding him in my next life. I'd had the same thought regarding Jenny, but it seemed to me both unfair and futile: the Jenny I had known and loved would have died. The Vincent who'd known me so well this life wouldn't in the next. To place those expectations on unsuspecting mortals was to doom myself to disappointment, and them to unhappiness. And I loved them too much to wish that upon them.)

We did not, in the end, build a God machine. We mentored a small number of students who might go on to do so, and many others that might supply the graduate and postgraduate workforce for one, the calculations, the research, the late nights in the lab. It was a good life, one I felt sorry to say goodbye to as the doctor came back into the exam room and told me what the tests said, what I already knew. 

I would have given up and died peacefully, but for Vincent, who drove me to chemotherapy, yelled at my doctors, my health insurance. (We were at that time in America, and our university included a teaching hospital. My doctors were young and bright and determined they could beat these cancers, and I didn't tell them how wrong they were because they would find out soon enough.) His grief made me feel a fraud, but finally, towards the end, I grabbed his hand and looked into his agate eyes. He had a tonsure of gray ringlets, laugh lines, a small paunch. I somehow knew he'd live a long time after me.

"You must let go, Vincent," I told him. "The chemo isn't working. I don't have hair left for it to take, or a stomach for it to empty. Let me die, Vincent. Please, let me die."

He did not want to. Then again, he had no choice.

-

In my seventh life, when he barged into my rooms, I said, "For god's sake, Vincent, I've told you before, not when I'm sleeping," and then froze because I hadn't told him before in that life; I should not have even known his name.

Instead, a look of wonder spread across his face. He was younger--in his first year rather than his third--and plump with youth. "I thought I'd lost you," he said, and helped himself to a seat on my bed--and then he kissed me.

I don't know which surprised me more: the kiss, or the fact that he was a kalachakra like me. Although neither surprised me very much. He'd had such advanced notions about technology, and we'd been so close--

I was curling my fingers through his hair. "You should have told me," I said.

"You should have told me," he countered, throwing a leg over me. "When I was watching you die slowly of cancer. You couldn't have told me that you would be back in the next life?"

I kissed him this time. I'd lived through the sixties and seventies multiple times, and was not affronted by homosexuality as I might have been in my first few stodgy lives, but I didn't believe I'd ever been tempted by another man before. Not until Vincent. "You would have thought my mind was going from the chemotherapy, and it would only have upset you more."

"True," said Vincent, pushing me back into the pillows. "I do love your mind. Don't worry, I'm quite fond of your body too."

"Oh, I was wondering what you were doing atop me in my bed," I said, and he kissed me again.

We didn't sleep that night, between the consummation of decades of yearning, and the meandering conversations of our experiences, the confessions we hadn't been able to share in our previous lives.

We also didn't build a God machine in that life, but at the time, I did not think it that important.

-

In my eighth life, Vincent casually told me that he forgot nothing, that he remembered everything, from life to life.

"Must be useful," I said, watching him scrawl out more calculations, swearing for lack of a pocket calculator. I didn't know why I didn't tell him that I was the same: that I retained everything in perfectly excruciating detail. Why I could have thrown my lot in with him, for three lives now and more to come, why I could have loved him, and yet lied to him about something like that. He did not question it either, which made me rest easier, but feel more guilty.

-

In my ninth life, technology began to speed up. I couldn't tell if it had been similarly advancing in the last and I'd still been too caught up in Vincent to notice, or if it was something we were doing, flitting from university to university, our stacks of notes and calculations growing with each displacement, our schematics more complicated, our funding more generous. Our web of contacts ever expanding, our contributors sometimes putting together ideas that we--having been through this three times before--had dismissed as unworkable, only to now be proven wrong.

In Boston we were adopted by a pale cat. She had gray patches, was fairly young according to the veterinarian we took her to see when she would agree to it, and lived for catching mice, and curling up on our laps whenever it was cold out and she needed a place warmer than the sofa, or the pillows of our bed, or the chair the safest distance from the creaking, hissing radiator, which seemed to her the stuff of nightmares. (It was, I suppose, ironic that for all the technological progress we'd brought with us, we'd only been able to rent an ancient, unfashionable apartment on our lecturers' salaries.) Vincent claimed to not like her, that she was a parasitical waste of resources and smelled besides, but there were days when he lay abed because she'd chosen to sleep on his chest, and he did not want to disturb her.

I had to laugh at him then, his rueful tenderness as he traced her sleeping form, and one morning he looked up at me and asked, "Did you ever have children?"

"No," I said, struck by the suddenness of the question into honesty. "I was afraid that I might pass on to them whatever this condition is."

He made a thoughtful sound. "And if you did," he said, "you'd have to have them every life, or they would cease to be, I think."

I had not considered that. A chill ran down my spine with the idea of it. I'd already known that if I'd had children, I might be losing them each successive life, but if they were the sort to remember--and if they were winked out by my choices--

I supposed I didn't want them anyway. We'd had a few local nuclear catastrophes, in this life and the past, as humanity adjusted poorly to the technology we'd brought them, and just this morning I'd seen in the news an article about a plague emerging from the Siberian permafrost. I'd lived nine lives, and seen too much cruelty and horror to subject a child to it.

"Sometimes," said Vincent, still quiet, still thoughtful, "I fear that the God machine will only tell us we are freaks of recombination, born one way, in one moment, and that in any lifetime a chance rearrangement of our DNA at the moment of conception will take our lives away from us; that the we who are here and now and then and then, will simply vanish. Like we never existed."

And there was nothing I could say to that.

-

In my tenth life, I noticed the world changing, and not for the better.

There was smog, heinous and heavy, in the sky. There were extinctions on land and in the sea. A hole was opening up in the atmosphere; coral reefs were reduced to bleached, wispy skeletons. Weather patterns were extreme and unpredictable.

After watching one more report on a city destroyed by a hurricane, I found myself looking at Vincent and thinking, _après lui, le déluge_. Because I did not doubt that this had something to do with the dizzying pace of technology that we had shepherded into being over our past few lives. The smokestacks belching out clouds, the nuclear reactors churning out waste. The future was being poisoned a little more, a little faster. And it was being done by us--I would have said unknowingly, but there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see.

My doubts grew in me like tumors, until finally, I brought up the subject.

Vincent shrugged. "What we are building, Harry," he said, "can tell us how to build it again so that these side effects vanish. It will give us clean energy, but first we have to make it."

He didn't sound very convincing, but I held my tongue. I'd lived long enough to see fossil fuels become a concern, to see the birth of solar panels, the return of windmills. Humanity was always like that, I supposed, and I knew it could be done.

But for the futures that came after us... some people would die. Many people. Many, many people would die. If and when we completed the God machine, I could not ask it to tally the lives on my conscience.

"The arctic is melting," I protested, but not very strongly, as his hand continued from my knee up the inseam of my trousers. This was an old, old move of his, and yet I always ended up tumescent, breathless, telling him to undo my flies and end this torture. Despite the complete lack of authority in my voice, he was always happy to comply.

"We'll see it in our next life," he said, "ice and all."

-

In my eleventh life, I was grabbed off the street. My head was shoved into a burlap bag and I was pulled unceremoniously into a dark car.

It was not the first time I'd been abducted, but it was the first time I had no idea why.

I was smuggled through the streets of London, bumping all the way. My captors had tied my hands behind my back, my feet together. They had some sort of lock on my neck that essentially immobilized me and I wondered why it was my studies never included hand-to-hand combat. I supposed it was the lasting influence of my adoptive father, that there was something underhanded about fighting. Patrick August would have seen such a pursuit as a lack of faith in the great orderliness of the British nation.

My biological father, however, was possibly the dirtiest fight I could imagine. He attacked those who could not fight back.

My shoes dragged over paving stones, then carpet; there were a few doors opened and closed, and finally I was thrown into a chair, my ropes readjusted, and the bag alighting from my head.

There was a battleship of a woman sitting in front of me. She wore a positively Victorian black dress and a deeply unimpressed expression. "Hello, Harry," she said.

"Hello. I'm afraid I don't know your name."

She sighed. "How polite. What you need know of me is that I represent the Chronos Club, an organization that would like to stop you from bringing about the second cataclysm."

"The second cataclysm?"

She then told me a story about a man named Victor Hoeness, who sold the future's weaponry to the past's kings. About the dizzying arms race that ensued. About nuclear annihilation, or as good as.

"And now it is happening again," she said. Behind me, the men who'd abducted me shifted, I'd like to think nervously. "The world ends, and it ends earlier, and earlier."

The side effects of the God Machine, she meant. My mouth went dry. "I was planning on fixing it."

She shook her head. "You can't. When the world ends, the ouroborans who would have been born afterwards don't get born. They stop existing in that life, and the one after it, and the one after that. And there is currently silence, after the twenty-second century."

Oh. "I didn't know." The shape of it, yes. Not the extent of it. Not extinction.

_"Men,"_ she said. It was astonishing how much derisiveness she'd packed into that one syllable. 

One of the men standing behind me cleared his throat. She ignored him.

"We were going to fix it. What we're building--would have fixed it, and a lot of other things--"

"Merely because you intend to fix it, it doesn't mean you can. You are familiar with the saying about the road to hell? The pace of your technological developments outstrips man's ability to adapt. In earlier lives, there is enough time to debate the havoc technology wreaks upon the planet, and to mitigate the damage--but just barely. What you are doing must be stopped, and immediately. I need you to tell me about your accomplices."

Rattled, I had let a plural pronoun slip, and it was no longer only me in their sights. I swallowed. I understood her concerns, I was willing to stop now that I knew what was at stake. But I did not think Vincent would be, and I did not know what they would do to Vincent if they got their hands on him. "They're linears," I said. "If I stop, they will. Next life."

She tsked. There was a loud sound and a jolt of pain, the salt of blood in my mouth. One of the men standing behind me had hit me.

Violence, real violence, had not been a large part of my experience so far, and especially not such calm and controlled violence. In a perverse way, it soothed me.

"Please don't try to lie to us, Harry," she said. "You want to save the world as much as we do. Give us their names."

I smiled. I suspected my teeth were already stained red. "You'll have to find them on your own."

She rose from her chair, skirts rustling, and made a hand gesture to the men behind me.

The room we went into next was modern and sterile. I'd been expecting something more old-fashioned: chains, tongs, perhaps an iron maiden. Instead I was strapped into something more resembling a dentist's chair. Thankfully, there were none of the implements one associates with dentistry in the room: my teeth weren't going to be extracted one by one, holes weren't going to be drilled into me, my eyes weren't going to be clamped open as needles poked at them, or a sharpened spoon scooped them out. The men made sure I was secured, and then they and the woman left me to the bright room, and the sound of a riotous march, piped in from a gramophone. I recognized it, something I'd heard on television, something I could have placed were my head not ringing, my arms not aching, the room not so bright. 

They played it, at various speeds and volumes, until I lost track of time. And then the woman was there again.

"Sousa's Liberty Bell," she said, in response to a question I didn't remember asking.

"Oh." I struggled to hold my head up. My back was in agony. I was too young for this, surely.

She touched something, and the chair reclined. There was an instant of relief so sweet I wanted to cry. My circulation was restored, my eardrums spared the noise. The lights had been lowered, and when I closed my eyes the glow no longer shone through. "I dare say you're familiar with it from Monty Python, but Sousa first composed it for an operetta entitled _the Devil's Deputy._ "

I smiled. Someone held a cup to my lips and I drank almost instinctively. And then I realized what they might be pouring down my throat, and I tried to spit it out, but fingers pinched my nose shut, and poured the rest in.

I could have drowned myself. I should have drowned myself. I'd wake in my twelfth life and find--

"It's water. There's a little laudanum for the pain, but that's all." The woman was staring down at me. She looked like the kind of governess that might have raised my biological grandparents, or great-grandparents, and I was her impossibly spoiled charge. "Harry, why must you be so stubborn?"

I thought of Patrick August, trudging about the Houlne estate in silent mourning. Whipping me wordlessly: I knew he did not want to hurt me, but he had been taught that this was how one improved children. Growing old, and accepting only the smallest, most parceled-out help. "Luck, I suppose."

She gave me a very no-nonsense look that might have reminded me of my father even if I hadn't already been thinking of him. "You won't give us their names."

"I'm afraid not."

"In that case." She gave one of the attendants a nod, and turned around to inspect how well strapped-in I was. I was fairly well strapped-in.

She adjusted the chair, until I was in a sitting position, more or less, and then more attendants came in. They were of the same mold of the two already there, male and youngish and silent, and the only difference I could see were that these were carrying syringes, and a tangle of wires. I'd done some work with engineering, and still it took me a while to process it, the electrodes, the needles, and I had to roll my eyes theatrically at the woman as her attendants stuck the electrodes to my scalp.

"I told you, I'm not going to talk," I said. The device didn't worry me. No one had yet developed a machine that uncovered the truth. Even the drugs that were used were more suggestions than compulsions. Electric shocks might be painful, but I has fought in several wars, and eight rounds of cancer; I knew pain. 

The woman tsked again. "I've been doing this a long time, Harry. Believe me when I say I know how to find your partners in crime."

The last electrode was secured, and someone put a block of wood between my teeth. I tensed; it would be hard not to

"But I am truly sorry it has to come to this." She reached out to the device, and flipped a switch.

Then there was light, and darkness, and nothing.

-

We were on holiday together--sharing a room to share the expense, for my salary was not large. I had some suspicion that Vincent was from a wealthy family, but he did not volunteer this information, and I did not ask. I spared us both the embarrassment of ascertaining that he could have afforded his own lodgings, and more sumptuous lodgings, and, I dare say, a more appealing vacation spot than the west of England.

He was sprawled across the bed when I came in from my morning walk, his nose buried in a book, his argyle socks a small riot of color against the unmade sheets. I sat down next to him; the chairs were far away, and it did not seem to matter if I mussed the sheets.

I'd thought the book was for his studies, but the chapter--or story, I supposed--title disabused me of that notion. "Oh whistle and I'll come to you, my lad?"

"A ghost story," Vincent explained. "About a man who does not believe in the supernatural, and, not believing in it, tampers with things far beyond his understanding, and nearly dies for it."

I had to hesitate. I did not know whether kalachakra could be considered supernatural, or if Vincent had noticed something about me that had aroused his suspicions. It had been only two lives; I did not want the Chronos Club having to intervene and save me from having revealed our secrets again so soon. "I did not take you for a reader of fiction," I said, lightly. "Especially not tales of horror."

He rolled onto his back, and peered up at me from the pillow. "It's different, isn't it? Ghosts feel more tangible: people leave impressions of themselves in names and places and others all the time."

I thought of the obelisks, the messages and jokes passed down from century to century that the Chronos Club had told me about. I thought of my father, tending the grounds. Of my Jenny. Of Virginia, learning what I had told Phearson so far, and sighing that it could not be helped. "What sort of ghost is it?"

Vincent snorted. "An ancient Roman spirit that hides inside the sheets of an empty bed and tries to catch the narrator in his sleep."

"Well," I said, "good thing there's only one bed."

He ran a hand over the sheets of said bed and smiled at me. There was something about his smile that I could not resist: he always seemed so delighted by me. By my bad jokes and my good observations, by my fair to middling cooking, by my dour commentary on our outings. I don't suppose I thought of it as such at that time, but there was a pleasant compatibility between us. We worked surprisingly well together, although I wouldn't know how well for a few centuries, and then I'd find out in a matter of hours in Pietrok-112, when we worked as equals. At the time, however, he was an annoyingly intelligent undergraduate, and I an impoverished lecturer; we were, currently literally, odd bedfellows. "It's a very nice bed," he said. 

"Well, it's not the rocks and horsehair of our college beds, but it'll have to do." Vincent shrugged, and turned another page. "So, do you like ghost stories, or was that the only book you had packed?"

He looked up at me again, and said, "I'm quite fond of ghost stories, Harry. I suspect everyone is--or at least of the premise that those we've loved are never truly gone."

I thought of my family, of Jenny, of my six long and lonely lives. "Yes," I said. I wanted to take his hand, but we were professor and student, even if he never acted like it. "I can see how that would be appealing."

He carried on looking at me for quite some time, as if expecting more, and then, I suppose, the lure of the story proved too great, and he returned to his book.

-

In my sixth life, I met Vincent Rankis.

**Author's Note:**

> Rating for (non-explicit) torture. The story Vincent is reading is by M. R. James. 
> 
> No happy endings.


End file.
